Simon Harper

Mohammed Basheikh, Rujiravee Kongdee, Hood Thabit et al.

This study explored healthcare professionals' perspectives on the management of Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus (T1DM) through a two-part questionnaire. The first part examined how clinicians prioritise and apply current clinical guidelines, including the relative importance assigned to different aspects of T1DM management. The second part investigated clinicians' perceptions of patients' ability to interpret data from the glucose monitoring devices and to make appropriate treatment decisions. An online questionnaire was completed by 19 healthcare professionals working in diabetes-related roles in the United Kingdom. The findings revealed that blood glucose management is prioritised within clinical guidance and that advice is frequently tailored to individual patient needs. Additionally, clinicians generally perceive that data presented in glucose monitoring devices is easy for patients to interpret and based on these data, they believe that patients occasionally make correct treatment decisions.

Simon Harper, Tianyi Chen, Yeliz Yesilada

Performing controlled user experiments on small devices in naturalistic mobile settings has always proved to be a difficult undertaking for many Human Factors researchers. Difficulties exist, not least, because mimicking natural small device usage suffers from a lack of unobtrusive data to guide experimental design, and then validate that the experiment is proceeding naturally.Here we use observational data to derive a set of protocols and a simple checklist of validations which can be built into the design of any controlled experiment focused on the user interface of a small device. These, have been used within a series of experimental designs to measure the utility and application of experimental software. The key-point is the validation checks -- based on the observed behaviour of 400 mobile users -- to ratify that a controlled experiment is being perceived as natural by the user. While the design of the experimental route which the user follows is a major factor in the experimental setup, without check validations based on unobtrusive observed data there can be no certainty that an experiment designed to be natural is actually progressing as the design implies.